Day: April 23, 2015

The Teradata Universe conference in Amsterdam in April 2015 was particularly popular, with a record 1,200 attendees this year. Teradata always scores unusually high in our customer satisfaction surveys, and a recurring theme is its ease of maintenance compared to other databases. At this conference the main announcement continued this theme with the expansion of its QueryGrid, allowing a common administrative platform across a range of technologies. QueryGrid can now manage all three major Hadoop implementations, MapR, Cloudera and HortonWorks, as well as its own Aster and Teradata platforms. In addition the company announced a new appliance, the high-end 2800, as well as a new feature they call the software-defined warehouse. This allows multiple Teradata data warehouses to be managed as one logical warehouse, including allow security management across multiple instances.

The conference had its usual heavy line-up of customer project implementation stories, such as an interesting one by Volvo, who are doing some innovative work with software in their cars, at least in the prototype stage. For example in one case the car sends signals to any cyclists with a suitably equipped helmet, using a proximity alert. In another example the car can seek out spare parking spaces in a suitably equipped car park. A Volvo now has 150 computers in it, generating a lot of data that has to be managed as well as creating new opportunities. Tesla is perhaps the most extreme example so far of cars becoming software-drive, in their case literally allowing remote software upgrades in the same way that occur with desktop computers (though hopefully car manufacturers will do a tad more testing than Microsoft in this regard). The most entertaining speech thatI saw was by a Swedish academic, Hans Rosling, who advises UNICEF and the WHO and who gave a brilliant talk about the world’s population trends using extremely advanced visualisation aids, an excellent example of how to display big data in a meaningful way.

Andy Hayler

Andy Hayler is a passionate and outspoken commentator on the enterprise software market. A 20-year veteran of data modelling, warehousing and integration projects, he was named a Red Herring Top 10 Innovator in 2002 for founding Kalido – an innovative information management company that provides customers with the ability to dynamically view the impact of business changes. The views expressed on this blog are Andy’s own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Information Difference.